Here's one dumb but plausible scenario of how the world ends:<p>A new automated network-exploit tool is being researched.<p>One day a national-security intern brings their vape inside the faraday cage at work. Completely forgetting the damn thing has a quad-core armv7, bluetooth and 802.11ac for google now functionality of course.<p>After doing a quick battery check, they go outside to take a hit, and unknowingly release into the wild the worst digital virus humanity has ever experienced.<p>It does not take long for the vape to exploit their work phone, however this is contained by OS. What's not contained is the wifi security camera across the street. The tool makes short work of the bootleg windows xp POS terminal inside the store too.
It pwns the wifi-router, finds a bunch of gaming PCs with GPUs good enough to run hash-cracking on, and the rest is history. Turns out all the Cisco and Huawei firmware keys were still up on pastebin so the tool starts mining ethereum instead, no one knows why. Intel gets a mysterious $75Billion order for FPGAs. Rolling blackouts start happening. Boston Dynamics tries to file for IPO.<p>The 9 mortals left on earth who still know to reconfigure BGP(Border Gateway Protocol) have all gone afk. No one is sure where they are or if they even wanna help after all these years.
(current) AI is not smart it's a method to have a reasonable predictable outcome from a wide range of inputs. But it is still a linear program.<p>Let say we program a self driving car to estimate the impact effect of a collision with an object. Then we 'learn' it that a crash with a soft object will be better for the human in the car.<p>So we think the car is smart because it can detect soft and hard objects. But in case of an unavoidable crash it steers into a group of people instead of a parked car...<p>The Pentagon (DARPA) is now investing in AI that learns from previous experiences (without feeding it a dataset over and over again). I guess other companies are working on this as well. That will create scary AI because then the program will be altered all the time making it 'smart'.
Interesting to see this and "A.I. Shows Promise as a Physician Assistant" [0] on the front page at the same time.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19140220" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19140220</a>